June 25th, 2012. The OpenNebula project is proud to announce the availability of the beta release of OpenNebula 3.6 (Lagoon). This release is focused on stabilizing the features introduced in OpenNebula 3.4, improving the performance of some existing features, and adding new features for virtualization management and integration with the new OpenNebula Marketplace.

OpenNebula 3.6 features a new hotplug mechanism for disk volumes that supports attaching either volatile volumes or existing images to a running VM. Also for OpenNebula 3.6 we have re-written from scratch the Quota and Accounting tools, so now they are included in the OpenNebula core to enhance their integration with the existing AuthZ & AuthN mechanisms and other related tools (e.g. Sunstone). There are some other new features like VM rescheduling, hard reboots, cloning of disk images…

OpenNebula 3.6 also features improvements in other systems, especially in Sunstone's interface with the redesign of several tabs as well as in the OpenNebula Zones where we got rid of the datamapper dependency to ease the packaging of OpenNebula.

Last but not least, OpenNebula 3.6 is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can very easily find and deploy virtual appliances through familiar tools like the SunStone GUI or the OpenNebula CLI. The OpenNebula Marketplace is also of the interest of any software developer to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.

With this beta release, OpenNebula Lagoon enters feature freeze and we'll concentrate on fixing bugs and smoothing some rough edges. This release is aimed at testers and developers to try the new features.

As usual OpenNebula releases are named after a Nebula. The Lagoon Nebula (also known as M8, or NGC 6523) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius.

Volume hotplug, you can now easily hot plug volumes to a running VM. The volumes can be either a volatile disk created on-the-fly on the target host where the VM is running, or an existing image from a Datastore.

New Quota system, the quota system has been rewritten from scratch. Now it uses the OpenNebula database and it is fully integrated in the OpenNebula core. It also features new quotas for storage and networking.

LVM drivers, an adapted version to work with the datastore system has been included in OpenNebula 3.6.

Clone disk images, to easily get a copy of an existing disk. The clone operation is performed by interacting with the target datastore, so invoking a specialized clone action.

Duplicate VM templates, to easily create a new VM definition by starting from a working template.

Performance improvements in Authorization, the authorization process has been improved, so no external process is invoked when no specific auth driver is configured. Now that quotas are integrated in the core, this will be the most likely configuration.

Multiple servers for LDAP driver, now OpenNebula can handle multiple LDAP servers when authenticating a user, easing the deployment of multi-site clouds.

Generic Document DB, this is a feature target to OpenNebula developers. The generic storage document model allows component developers to store the state of their applications within the OpenNebula database, leveraging the OpenNebula facilities like AuthZ & AuthN systems or existing users and groups.

OpenNebula Marketplace

Sunstone Integration: Sunstone includes a new tab that allows OpenNebula users to interact with the OpenNebula Marketplace.

CLI Integration: There is a new command, onemarket, to easily interact with the Marketplace.

Sunstone & Self Service Portal

There are several new features in the GUI applications:

Collaborative Translations: Sunstone & Self-service include support for several languages, we have set up a project at transifex.net to ease the addition of new languages.

Re-design, still a work in progress for this beta, but you can get a preview of a new dashboard for the main application and for the cluster view.

Support for OpenNebula new features, to include support for hot-pluging, cloning…

OpenNebula Zones Servers

The OpenNebula Zone server includes some minor bug fixes as well as the migration of its persistency libraries to sequel. This change greatly improves the installation and packaging of the component.

Migrating from OpenNebula 3.4

OpenNebula 3.6 is API compatible with OpenNebula 3.x, so you should expect that applications and drivers developed for 3.x work with this release, with the exception of custom authentication drivers.

Also there have been minor changes in the OpenNebula DB schema to accommodate the quota & accounting data. These changes are automatically managed by the migration process, but if you have developed any customization you may need to update it.

There are two new datastore operations, stat (to compute the size of an image prior to its creations) and clone (to copy an existing image). OpenNebula includes suitable defaults for all the supported datastores, just check them if you have tune the datastore drivers for your installation.

Documentation

The documentation of OpenNebula 3.6 can be found here. The documents are in a development state so watch out, and do not hesitate to ask in the mailing list.

Acknowledgements

The OpenNebula project would like to thank the community members and users who have contributed to this software release by being active with the discussions, answering user questions, or providing patches for bugfixes, features and documentation.